A standard assessment and accountability system (SAAS) allows those involved in the educational process to measure their performance against a particular standard and take corrective action where necessary. Examples of these types of systems include the No Child Left Behind Act which builds on the framework of standards based educational reform and sets more specific testing and accountability requirements for the states. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was passed to promote improvements to the American educational system. The purpose of the law was to ensure that all children have a fair, equal and significant opportunity to obtain a high quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging state academic achievement standards and state academic assessments. Among its provisions, the No Child Left Behind Act promotes increased empowerment and involvement by law makers, administrators, teachers, students and parents. The Act also provided for accountability for student performance and annual academic assessment of student performance.
The overall strategy of the Act is to identify successes and failures in the educational system via a yearly assessment test. The testing results are provided to everyone from parents and students to district administrators and state officials. Individual choices can be made to improve each student's education at different levels in the following manners. Parents have the option to move their children out of a failing school and into a more successful school, receive tutoring, or attend after school programs at the cost of their school district. Schools can provide professional development funding to teachers in need of improvement. District administrators can ensure that every student demographic is provided an equal, high quality education. The state agencies can reallocate funds to target areas such as dropout prevention programs and intervention programs for delinquent, neglected and at risk youth. Additional funding awards can be provided to schools showing marked improvement.
Examples of these assessment programs within the states include, for example, the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS). TAKS is a testing program that replaced the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills Test. Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) are the center of the curriculum and define the basic content of the instructional and assessment programs in the State of Texas. TEKS outlines the knowledge and skills required of every student on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test. The successful implementation of the TEKS is dependent upon school staff having a thorough understanding of the TEKS and the relationship to the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test. Student achievement on the TAKS is best assured by high quality classroom instruction with a TEKS focus. Of course, while the present example is with respect to a Texas educational standard, any state standard may be used.
Currently, student performance is measured at the end of the school term via the TAKS testing program. There is no method for students, parents, teachers or school administrators to know which TEKS have been covered in class or to what extent, how well students understand the course materials, whether daily assignments are applicable and are focused on specific TEKS areas, whether any problem areas or subjects need to be revisited, whether there is an instructor issues, classroom problem, textbook problem or student learning disability, and whether there is an issue with behavior control or attendance. The onus to educate students and correct any problems in the learning process remains with the instructor, parents and school administrators. However, these problem areas cannot be corrected if they are not known. Each step of the educational process cannot be improved if it cannot be measured.
One problem with assessment testing such as the TAKS program is that the assessment tests are only performed once a year. Standards based assessment testings are normally administered a maximum of once a year because they can be physically and emotional stressful to the students. Students are also required to spend a significant amount of time preparing for both the test subjects and in test taking practices. The tests are normally administered over a three to five day period and depending upon a school's policy, students may not be allowed to progress to a next grade level based on their test performance. Thus, an entire year of school work could be nullified by a single bad day.
The assessment tests may also be time consuming and disruptive. Normal school activities will be disrupted due to the several days required for completion of the test. School is additionally disrupted by the time before a scheduled assessment test required to prepare the students on test taking strategies and practice tests rather than on test subject material. The tests are also financially costly due to the salaries needed to be paid to teaching staff and test proctors, the payment for the testing materials, payment for the scoring process and for the reporting process. Another problem with annual assessment tests are that they may be skewed by indifference, cheating or poor proctoring. Cheating students and poor proctoring practices during the administration of the test can cause inaccurate results to be achieved. Also, many students do not take the assessment test seriously since they have no bearing on their normal school grades.
Thus, the standards assessment and accountability concept for improving education is not as successful as it might be for a number of reasons. The long test cycle enables tests to only be administered once per year. This assessment process normally occurs during the end of the year when it is too late to improve student performance. Thus, underperforming students are not identified until the end of the school year. While using the testing results, adjustments may be made to the curriculum and teaching methods, these changes may only be administered in the following year's students. While parents are provided with the assessment results at the end of the school year, it is too late for parents to intervene to help improve their child's performance. Since the single assessment test is the only source of data to ascertain the breadth and depth of a student's knowledge, when students are indifferent, cheat or simply have a bad day, the test scores may be skewed and not reflect the true measure of the student's performance.
Assessment tests are also one dimensional. They only provide a measurement of the student's knowledge at the end of the school year. Many other determining factors are not taken into consideration, such as daily assignment grades, student attendance and behavior, documented coverage of all applicable state standards, concepts taught in the classroom, adequate amount of class assignments relating to state standards concepts, performance per teacher per classroom and the combination of environmental, demographic and all of the above data.
The standards assessment and accountability concept also does not address day-to-day school activities and does not measure the individual performance of teachers and school administrators. Thus, it is difficult to implement any type of accountability procedures based upon test results. Finally, since parents only receive test results at the end of the school year, they do not have the ability to help their children target their most difficult subjects.
Thus, there is a need to provide a more up-to-date real time assessment of how individual students are performing with respect to established educational standards.